Well no luck with the Installation of Win 7 x64 Ultimate. I get what appears to be the infamous : I have tried various things proposed here and on other site among others, the shift + 10 mode proposed by HSChronic in order to partition and format the disk . Now here is my assumptions. 1. Since Win 7 (winPE) in GUI or at the command level , is able to see the disk and states ok in cleaning it, making a partition and formatting it - although a SATA drive, I do not need to use the load driver option and Win7 has recognized the drive and has built in drivers. 2. I have changed my bios setting so that the hard drive on which I want Win 7 is the first hard drive in the rank. ( I have 4 Hard drives) 3. My Intention is to keep XP on 1 Sata drive and have Win 7 on another - clean and dedicated Sata drive for Win 7. ( the plan is to later backup Win 7, when I am happy with it , with Acronis - Merge my 2 Sata drives back into a raid 0 configuration and restore win 7 on the Raid array getting rid of win xp) But I want to test Win 7 and let it ride before I do that , and have to check if the new gadgets from Acronis will let me go from single drive and restore to a raid array.) Bottom line, and if what I find on the Internet is correct - I am down to disconnecting all non essential hardware, which at this stage I am also considering disconnecting ALL my hard drives - except the Virgin one on which I want to Install Win 7 and my cd rom. Question: If I do that and successful at Installing Win 7 on said drive, once I reconnect everything how do I go about obtaining a Welcome screen in Win 7 presenting me the Option of Dual boot hence select which System to boot at? ( I don't want to have to change my drive order in bios every time to go to XP) Frankly disappointing this Win 7 failed Install....crap Win XP and 2000 and NT4 were none issue and frankly smarter from what I can see with limited Win 7 use ( and I only saw 2 screens!!!) ============== Any tips welcome before I put my head in the casing....crap and here I am thinking Win 7 was going to be a breeze....should have known better, it's M$S after all! Arrrgghhhhhhh
Oi vey. This is what I would do if I were you, because I don't even know where to begin to get you to do it the way you were describing. At least, it's much more difficult. 1. Make an Acronis backup of your XP, change to a RAID 0 setup and fool with getting XP restored now with RAID drivers in Acronis to see if you can at least get that to work semi-painlessly. 2. Shrink your XP partition so that there's room for a Windows 7 partition (just restore using Acronis and specify the original or smaller size, since you'll be restoring to a larger available space via RAID 0 anyway). 3. Install Windows 7, never changing your boot order. Windows 7 will install a different boot loader on the XP partition, giving you the option of which OS to load. 4. When you're sick of XP, you can delete many of it's files from within Windows 7 and shrink the partition as small as you can go. Just be careful not to delete any of the files necessary to boot into Windows 7. If you do or you experience any problem, you can boot the Win 7 DVD again, load your RAID drivers and choose to Repair Startup and that should fix you up. Going from non-RAID to RAID is much more difficult than the other way around. I realize that with Universal Restore that perhaps Acronis makes it easier/possible, but I still haven't fiddled around with it enough, or had reason to, to know how well this works; I'm just telling you that it's easier if they're RAID to begin with. FWIW, I like installing Vista and 7 much better than XP and previous. It's much faster to install even though it's so much larger, and so much easier to load RAID drivers (no floppy needed). Unless you were using unattended installation features of installing XP, there's none of that stopping in the middle of installation to ask you questions like there was in XP, either.